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Chicago: A City of a Thousand Films

By Ray Pride | January 15, 2009

Slide 1: Call Northside 777

The first Mayor Daley didn't like movies being made in Chicago, His Chicago. His provincial pride kept the city from being captured in deathless, breathless visions of urbanity, like Manhattan got in Sweet Smell of Success.

Slide 2: Call Northside 777

Before Daley's time, the city had notably been the location for Call Northside 777, a true-crime tale starring Jimmy Stewart as an upright prosecutor. The glimpses you get of the city, a mid-century metropolis of stone and light, interrupted by shadow, are like glimpses you can still get, wandering near the Loop at night.

Slide 2a: Call Northside 777

Daley didn't loosen his grip on location filming until 1971, when a Candice Bergen movie called T.R. Baskin was made by a young director named Peter Hyams. He had an in, of sorts: he had been the anchorman for the local CBS affiliate only a year earlier.

Slide 3: Call Northside 777

Some nights you look across the city and you can almost see the ghosts of the movies that were never made here, the Nelson Algren stories that could have been made in their own moment, the Studs Terkel-style banter wafting like mist.

Slide 4: Mickey One

Of the handful of movies made in Chicago in the 1960s, Mickey One may have been the brightest light.

Slide 5: Mickey One

Mickey One, directed by Arthur Penn, was a scat song of scattershot conceits drawing from jazz and 1960s absurdism, a stark black-and-white city, all anxiety and omen.

Slide 6: Mickey One

Warren Beatty's character, a dislocated stand-up comedian, is always on the run, ostensibly from the mob, but more likely, guilt itself.

Slide 7: Mickey One

As shot by Ghislain Cloquet, DP on Bresson's Au Hasard Balthasar and Mouchette, Mickey One assembles verities of junkpile and alleyway. Backlit by industrial fire near dawn, deserted Chicago alleys suggest not abandonment but decades of invisibility. An alley like this, seen during a five-alarm fire just before dawn, suggests the timeless glisten of urban dread.

Slide 8: Medium Cool

Haskell Wexler, scion of a moneyed Chicago family, also managed to slip under the radar of Daley the Father when he filmed Medium Cool forty years ago during the Democratic Convention.

Slide 9: Medium Cool

But seeing it today evokes another version of "Watch out, Haskell, it's real," the cry of an assistant as tear gas grenades hit Grant Park (where President-elect Obama celebrated with thousands others on election night): the reality of a rough Midwestern industrial city, and a neighborhood called uptown, where Robert Forster lives in a gloriously large but battered apartment.

Slide 10: Medium Cool

Shuttling between the political fracas downtown and his frayed home life, Medium Cool is a documentary-style time capsule just by virtue of having cameras pointing at subway and skyline.

Slide 11: Medium Cool

As in another movie from the next decade with eye-opening location work, Cooley High, Medium Cool leaves ghosts of areas since gentrified, tidied, quieted.

Slide 12: The Fury

Brian DePalma's The Fury is best-remembered for its explosive fate for villain John Cassavetes, but it offers glimpses of the then cleanest, safest, upscale neighborhood in the middle of the city, Lincoln Park.

Slide 13: The Fury

Bad dreams in a clean city in teenagers' lives: DePalma understood things gone wrong by daylight in The Fury in the way Don Siegel always did.

Slide 14: The Fury

Sometimes at night, Chicago suggests DePalma films that were never made, or Powell-Pressburger: if you love a city, you wonder what great filmmakers past might have made of its streets.

Slide 15: Thief

Michael Mann recreates Chicago in his own image. The creator's privilege, even at the risk of self-flattery.

Slide 16: Thief

Thief was set on the streets he knew after studying to be a painter in London.

Slide 17: Thief

Smart guy savoring the ruffians overheard and admired in youth.

Slide 18: Thief

Neon ablaze across freshly watered pavements: the fact of grit glazed with blazing bruise.

Slide 19: Thief

This image of a live-poultry truck driver in a blaze of neon tendrils and Tommy Lee Jones-black eyes of alarm and malice was in a show this summer. "It looks like Michael Mann," a cineaste said. "Does it?" Does it?

Slide 20: Thief

While Collateral is shot on video and meant to reflect a Latin-tinged Los Angeles, Chicago light is still gridded in his mind.

Slide 21: Thief

But as for Thief, this is the image that most evokes the omen and menace he observes so well on the streets of Chicago.

Slide 22: The Untouchables

DePalma returned to Chicago with The Untouchables, with a script by Chicago's sulfurous sage David Mamet: the location work, however, is surpassed even in secondary work by another Chicagoan...

Slide 23: Andy Davis

...Andy Davis. In movies like Code of Silence and Above the Law, practical locations match from shot to shot, offering a rare continuity of topography.

Slide 24: Andy Davis

If a character runs out of the Cultural Center (which figures as several sites in The Untouchables) down an alley, he'll wind up running onto the street that's actually there, rather than the usual urban patchwork that movies make of cities.

Slide 25: Andy Davis

The Fugitive's his best-known movie, but even when shooting the skyline, Davis shows the city that inspired him in understated, but inspired fashion.

Slide 26: Risky Business

The subways gleam and pulse to a Tangerine Dream score in Risky Business. The city's subway was never more sexual.

Slide 27: Risky Business

But to a character as young as Tom Cruise's Joel, an actor as young as Tom Cruise, any form of urban night, any idea of being a suburban knight, would come on the streets of Chicago.

Slide 28: The Blues Brothers/Ferris Bueller's Day Off

The Chicago showcased in The Blues Brothers and Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a city as less sexual, even non-sexual: bright, compulsive hit-all-the-marks celebrations, a game of cultural bumper-cars.

Slide 29: The Blues Brothers/Ferris Bueller's Day Off

The Johns Landis and Hughes making up for the tens of years before Daley II embraced Chicago's potential as cinematic jewel.

Slide 30: The Blues Brothers/Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Plus crashed cop cars in profusion...

Slide 31: The Blues Brothers/Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Ferris' afternoon of jollity would in fact take many more hours to traverse than the two hours of the film. He's a bright sprite who belongs in an even more jam-packed movie, always rushing from frame: "Run, Bueller, Run."

Slide 32: The Blues Brothers/Ferris Bueller's Day Off

To get from Wrigley Field to the Art Institute alone would get the city-loving teens to dusk.

Slide 33: The Blues Brothers/Ferris Bueller's Day Off

And then past dusk of the next day: it's a happy dream. (And one of Chicago newspaperman and retired thumb Richard Roeper's favorite movies.)

Slide 34: Candyman

Candyman is ripe and rife with metaphor, but Clive Barker's tingling conceits are enlivened by Bernard Rose's eye, creating a tacit critique of the much-maligned architectural vogue of the mid-1960s, where a brutal university campus was built upon a bustling Italian neighborhood, and there were shared likenesses between upscale apartment blocks and the vertical imprisoning within projects like Cabrini-Green.

Slide 35: Candyman

When those towers were demolished a couple of years ago, they were Babel with a kindly face, leaving utility cores behind with tropical murals and flamingo-pink walls where lives had passed brightly in the towering bunker.

Slide 36: High Fidelity

High Fidelity stars John Cusack and a wealth of other fine-featured faces, as well as this lipstick-red couch.

Slide 37: High Fidelity

High Fidelity is about the passing of youth and hopeful about the gain of knowledge. I am 30, I am male, hear my tears, weep my song; I am here to gentrify your city and rave to dusty grooves while I'm at it.

Slide 38: High Fidelity

But there is dark undercurrent: love of woman, yes, of the Beta Band, sure, of slacker alpha males, and perhaps just sad lovely destiny.

Slide 39: High Fidelity

Here in Chicago is that character dyspeptically drunk, washed of ideals tonight? Likely the same tavern; still local.

Slide 40: Road to Perdition

The final film shot by the great Conrad Hall was Road to Perdition, a $100 million jewel box made from a graphic novel.

Slide 41: Road to Perdition

Like many filmmakers, Hall saw the potential of the financial corridor of LaSalle Street. (Robby Müller photographed a deer at dawn on this street in John McNaughton's Mad Dog And Glory.)

Slide 42: Road to Perdition

Shot to shot, Road to Perdition is magic: burnished, gleaming, weighty.

Slide 43: Stranger than Fiction

In Stranger Than Fiction, Zach Helm and Marc Forster saw Chicago as a Tativille, a postmodern metropolis toy box where almost every location looked out onto street or sky, bursting with frames like a graphic novel.

Slide 44: Stranger than Fiction

While also very much of the moment in which it was made, it's a love note, timeless, to all manner of interiors and exteriors.

Slide 45: The Dark Knight

Wanted was a 2008 film that gave Chicago by night an airbrush-like sheen.

Slide 46: The Dark Knight

But it's Chris Nolan, DP Wally Pfister and their location managers who capture gleam and pulse in the glass boxes of this twenty-first century metropolis. Chicago of today: IMAX-originated aerial shots gleam and bank even reduced to 35mm and Blu-Ray.

Slide 47: The Dark Knight

A city with towers to be built and ascended by the wealthy or driven but fully in perspective only in starry concreteness by the eye aloft, the bat in motion, the man who is connoisseur.

Slide 48: The Dark Knight

"Why is he running, Dad?" "Because we have to chase him." "He didn't do anything wrong."

Slide 49:: The Dark Knight

"He's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him, because he can take it, because he's not a hero, he's a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a dark knight."

Slide 50: The Dark Knight

Pull the characters out of the frame and night is lush with menace. So Chicago: dreamt darkling particulars as common as cold or infectious as ever. A filmmaker whose vision sees Chicago. A proletarian symptom atop wild prairie, awaiting a second fire, the purifying force of a considered gaze.

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Chicago: A City of a Thousand Films

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